According to a story posted over at VRZone this weekend, it looks like Intel has not only started shipping the revised, no-more-SATA-bug B3 versions of the Cougar Point chipsets, but has also started sending out the Z68 variant to motherboard vendors. This completely new chipset for the Sandy Bridge platform brings quite a few new features to the table.

This chipset is aimed at the enthusiast that wants to utilize all of the features of their CPU and combines the display output support of the H67 chipset and the overclocking options of the P67 chipset. Even better, it will offer a completely new feature called "SSD caching" according to VRZone.

There aren't any details on what exactly this SSD feature is, we assume that this will offer similar capabilities of the Intel 310 SSD platform combining a smaller SSD and a larger standard spindle hard drive as a single partition to the OS. This has the potential to provide tremendous performance to the end user without sacrificing capacity.

Release is slated for the first week of May so you may yet have ANOTHER reason to delay building your Sandy Bridge box.